Ballet lets you know when you’ve gotten it right. Within the various styles of ballet, such as classical, neoclassical, Cecchetti, and Vaganova, there are clear aesthetic standards for technical achievement. A penché should look exactly like two hands of a clock at six o’clock, for example – one straight line from the tip of your back extended leg to through the standing leg to the floor. Bourrées should glide, not drill, as you move across the floor. Jump landings should be soundless, achieved by rolling through your feet from toe to heel rather than landing flat-footed. Positions like effacé, croisé, and ecarté, rotate the body’s center, achieving precise geometric angles with legs and arms, the extended leg’s pointed toe moving like the tip of a protractor.
This security in known ideals is either comforting or annihilating depending on your ability to meet them. The comfort comes when your technical ability is good enough to achieve the standard. It’s annihilating when as hard as you try you cannot reach it.
If you believe, as I once did, that achieving the standard was just a matter of training, of wanting it enough and working hard enough, then there is always hope. These things, at least, seem within your control.
“I wasn’t the most brilliant med student when it came to exams,” my mother once told me. “But I knew that I could sit my butt in a chair and study longer and harder than anyone else.” She passed her boards with flying colors. We attended her med school graduation when I was seven years old.
I also saw my father working as hard as any person could work, first on his dissertation for a PhD in education, which resulted in a published book as well as a degree, and then to be a professional opera singer. In opera, too, he did reach a professional level at his craft, but it was not a high enough level for it to be a full-time job. He wanted to keep going, to keep training, and then his voice teacher told him that she couldn’t be his teacher anymore because she had taught him everything she had to teach. He bemoaned a chest cavity that was smaller than Pavarotti’s. This was my first sense of the way one’s body can betray you.
Similarly, I “wasn’t accepted back” after the School of American Ballet’s Fifth Division level. I was just 11 or 12 years old, but they said I wasn’t strong enough to progress to the next level, B1. After B1 was B2, then C1 and C2, then for a lucky couple of students, an apprenticeship with New York City Ballet. The rest would have to populate other ballet companies. Or switch to other genres of dance or performance. Or quit dancing altogether.
My mother consulted a med school friend of hers who used to dance about what to do. “Don’t underestimate how much that hurts,” the friend told her.
“Don’t underestimate how much that hurts,” my mother repeated to me. All I reply is that, yes, it hurt a lot. The pain felt like it was in my stomach, doubling me over.
“Nonsense,” my grandmother said. She didn’t believe in depressive responses to pain. “If you don’t jump high enough” (that is what I told her the reason was) “then get a mini trampoline and jump, jump, jump. They don’t get to tell you that you can’t be a ballerina.”
All I could feel at that moment was that my mother got it and my grandmother did not. But I bought a mini jumping trampoline anyway. And I discovered that Melissa Hayden (a former principal with the NYCB) was teaching open classes that I could attend. I would find a way to keep training – first with her, then Madame Darvash, then with Willy Burmann at Ballet Arts. I kept up my Saturdays with Francis Patrelle at Ballet Academy East.
Unfortunately, SAB was right. About the technical limitations of my body, anyway. I spent another five years after that training and testing the limits of my abilities. Until they, I, broke.
“Don’t underestimate how much that hurts.”
And yet. There is a kind of peace that comes when you eventually accept that you did, indeed, touch the limits of the horizon against the sky. When you have done all that you humanly could. And it still wasn’t enough. The body I had was weak, but my will wasn’t. I was proud of this, at least, for a long time. Until I wasn’t.